Favourite Movie Adaptation of a Book

[Erich Templar]

The Old Dark House, adapted from J B Priestley's 'Benighted'. A B-movie, but a good one, sticking reasonably closely to the book, but improving on it with the character of Saul who appears nearly at the end. The film's version of him is far more sinister and intriguing than the book.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

Princess Bride.The book is virtually unreadable crap. The movie is magical. Perfect cast, great story, sly humor.

Stardust. Gaiman was involved in the movie adaptation, and it has significant changes from the book that tidy up the story and fit the film genre better. The book is a bit darker, but by no means his darkest stuff.

The Maltese Falcon (1941). Hays code forced the film to lighten a lot of the rough edges of the book, but the cast was perfect an the cinematography outstanding. The perfect noir mystery.

Something Wicked This Way Comes. A slight cheat, as Bradbury wrote the script in 1958, and failing to get it filmed turned the story into a novel in 1962 before Disney optioned the original screenplay (which was rewritten at one point behind Bradbury's back). But despite the watering down of the darker themes and the tension during production, it is a decent film of one of my favorite books.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Princess Bride is way up there.

But my number one adaptation of a book is "The Martian". They only screwed up the plot right at the end and if you cut straight from the launch to the epilog it would be perfect. The result is the only hard science fiction movie in existence.

 

[Lexxi]

Princess Bride

Die Hard aka Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp
Die Hard 2 aka 58 Minutes by Walter Wager
(the only two Die Hard films based on novels)

 

[Pancake]

I never knew that Princess Bride was a book. How embarrassing. I loved the movie though!

 

[Free]

But my number one adaptation of a book is "The Martian". They only screwed up the plot right at the end and if you cut straight from the launch to the epilog it would be perfect. The result is the only hard science fiction movie in existence.

Hard sf, except for the magic spacesuits/vehicle/hab that keep Watney from dying of radiation poisoning, and the hurricane-force winds that start off the book/movie being non-existent on Mars due to the red planet's tiny amount of atmospheric pressure (while wind speeds there don't even exceed 30 km an hour). Even science fiction with a strong emphasis on the science part still tends to have a whiff of fantasy about it.

But the film is an excellent adaptation.

 

[Free]

I never knew that Princess Bride was a book. How embarrassing. I loved the movie though!

William Goldman wrote the book and the screenplay.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Hard sf, except for the magic spacesuits/vehicle/hab that keep Watney from dying of radiation poisoning,

That's not so bad as hard SF goes.

and the hurricane-force winds that start off the book/movie being non-existent on Mars due to the red planet's tiny amount of atmospheric pressure

That was in the book and Andy Weir explicitly acknowledged them as an impossibility, and he considered a more mundane error on Watney's part leaving him lost, but he wanted to establish that this was a Watney-vs-Mars book, not a Watney-vs-Watney book.

On a scale of Alice in Wonderland to flat-out-documentary, I'd put The Martian around 9/10 hardness and I don't think any other SF movie is more than 3 or 4 out of 10. Maybe 2001 if you took ALL the weird mystical monolith stuff out.

 

[Free]

That was in the book and Andy Weir explicitly acknowledged them as an impossibility

I know the reasons why the storm was used, and one can argue they're excellent literary reasons (I doubt a Home Alone scenario would have worked for the story). Doesn't make it less impossible.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Still at least five points ahead of any other SF movie on the hardness scale. The competition is *really* bad.